zaterdag 4 juli 2009

This July 4th, Rebel and Agitate for ChangeSaturday 04 July 2009by: Jim Hightower | Visit article original @ AlterNet

Are you an agitator? You know, one of those people who won't leave well enough alone, who's always questioning authority and trying to stir things up.

If so, the Powers That Be detest you -- you ... you ... "agitator!" They spit the term out as a pejorative to brand anyone who dares to challenge the established order. "Oh," they scoff, "our people didn't mind living next to that toxic waste dump until those environmental agitators got them upset." Corporate chieftains routinely wail that "our workers were perfectly happy until those union agitators started messing with their minds."

In each case, the message is that America would be a fine country if only we could get rid of those pesky troublemakers who get the hoi polloi agitated about one thing or another.

Bovine excrement. Were it not for agitators, we wouldn't even have an America. The Fourth of July would be just another hot day, we'd be singing "God Save the Queen," and our government officials would be wearing white-powdered wigs.

Agitators created America, and it's their feisty spirit and outright rebelliousness that we celebrate on our national holiday. I don't merely refer to the Founders, either. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Ben Franklin and the rest certainly were derring-do agitators when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, creating the framework for a democratic republic. But they didn't actually create much democracy. In the first presidential election, only 4 percent of the people were even eligible to vote. No women allowed, no African Americans, no American Indians and no one who was landless.

So, on the Fourth, it's neither the documents of democracy that we celebrate nor the authors of the documents. Rather, it's the intervening two-plus centuries of ordinary American agitators who have struggled mightily against formidable odds to democratize those documents.

America's great rebellion didn't end with the British surrender at Yorktown. It was only getting started -- and the rebellion has moved through such great forces of agitation as the abolitionists and suffragists, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, the Populists and the Wobblies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Huey Long, the Square Deal and New Deal, Mother Jones and Woodie Guthrie, Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez -- and on into today's continuing fight for economic fairness, social justice and equal opportunity for all.

Without agitators battling in politics, on the job, in the marketplace, for the environment, on Wall Street, in education, for civil liberties and rights, and all across our society, democratic progress doesn't just stall, it falls back.

The Powers That Be -- especially America's overarching corporate and political forces (often the same) -- give lip service to democracy, but tend toward plutocracy, autocracy and kleptocracy. They prefer (and often demand) that We the People be passive consumers of their economic and political policies. Don't rock the boat, stay in your place, go along to get along -- be quiet, they urge.

Be quiet? Holy Thomas Paine! How could freedom-loving, democratic citizens shrink into quietude, especially when the Powers That Be feel so entitled to run roughshod over us? Even a dead fish can go with the flow. We've got to be livelier than that.

July Fourth is a time to enjoy fireworks, flags, hotdogs, ballgames and such -- but it's also a time to remember who we are: agitators!

It's not easy to stand against powerful interests. Sometimes it's lonely, and you get to feeling like the guy B.B. King sings about: "No one likes you but your momma, and she might be jiving you, too." It's not easy, but having those who dare to stand up is essential if our country is ever to achieve our ideals of fairness, justice and opportunity for all.

And when the establishment derisively assails you as an agitator, remember this: The agitator is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out.

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Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.Zie: http://www.truthout.org/070409A

vrijdag 3 juli 2009

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, reports suggested invading to end Saddam Hussein's control of the oil. (Photo: Getty Images)

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain "a prisoner of its energy dilemma" as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

That April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world's second largest oil reserves.

"Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," the report said.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."

The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco.

James Baker, the namesake for the public policy institute, was a prominent oil industry lawyer who also served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, and was counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign during the Florida recount in 2000.

Ken Lay, then-chairman of the energy trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.

At the time of the report, Cheney was leading an energy task force made up of powerful industry executives who assisted him in drafting a comprehensive "National Energy Policy" for President George W. Bush.

A Focus on Oil

It was believed then that Cheney's secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, later described a White House interest in invading Iraq and controlling its vast oil reserves, dating back to the first days of the Bush presidency.

In Ron Suskind's 2004 book, "The Price of Loyalty," O'Neill said an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda at the first National Security Council. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq's oil fields would be carved up.

Even at that early date, the message from Bush was "find a way to do this," according to O'Neill, a critic of the Iraq invasion who was forced out of his job in December 2002.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated February 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." [The New Yorker, February 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

A Commerce Department spokesman issued a brief statement when those documents were released stating that Cheney's energy task force "evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply."

There has long been speculation that a key reason why Cheney fought so hard to keep his task force documents secret was that they may have included information about the administration's plans toward Iraq.

"Conspiracy Theory"

However, both before and after the invasion, much of the US political press treated the notion that oil was a motive for invading Iraq in March 2003 as a laughable conspiracy theory.

Generally, business news outlets were much more frank about the real-politick importance of Iraq's oil fields.

For instance, Ray Rodon, a former executive at Halliburton, the oil-service giant that Cheney once headed, said he was dispatched to Iraq in October 2002 to assess the country's oil infrastructure and map out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry, according to an April 14, 2003 story in Fortune magazine.

"Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists."

At about the same time as Rodon's trip to Iraq - October 2002 - Oil and Gas International, an industry publication, reported that the State Department and the Pentagon had put together pre-war planning groups that focused heavily on protecting Iraq's oil infrastructure.

The next month, November 2002, the Department of Defense recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Kellogg, Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires.

The contract also called for "assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations."

In January 2003, as President Bush was presenting the looming war with Iraq as necessary to protect Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported that oil industry executives met with Cheney's staff to plan the post-war revival of Iraq's oil industry.

"Facing a possible war with Iraq, US oil companies are starting to prepare for the day when they may get a chance to work in one of the world's most oil-rich countries," the Journal reported on January 16, 2003.

"Executives of US oil companies are conferring with officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war, industry officials say.

"The Bush administration is eager to secure Iraq's oil fields and rehabilitate them, industry officials say. They say Mr. Cheney's staff hosted an informational meeting with industry executives in October [2002], with ExxonMobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton among the companies represented.

"Both the Bush administration and the companies say such a meeting never took place. Since then, industry officials say, the Bush administration has sought input, formally and informally, from executives and industry experts on how best to overhaul Iraq's oil sector."

Guarding the Oil Ministry

Despite the Bush administration's denials about oil as a motivation for war, the Bush administration's focus on Iraqi oil was firmly set.

On April 5, 2003, Reuters reported that the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project headed by Thomas Warrick, special adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, held its fourth meeting of the oil and energy-working group.

"That is likely to thrill oil companies harboring hopes of lucrative contracts to develop Iraqi oil reserves," the news agency reported. "Short-term rehabilitation of southern Iraqi oil fields already is under way, with oil well fires being extinguished by US contractor Kellogg Brown and Root ...

"Long-term contracts are expected to see US companies ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips compete with Anglo-Dutch Shell, Britain's BP, TotalFinaElf of France, Russia's LUKOIL and Chinese state companies."

After US troops captured Baghdad in April 2003, they were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry even as looters ransacked priceless antiquities from Iraq's national museums and stole explosives from unguarded military arsenals.

Unacceptable Options

In April 2001, the report laid out a series of unacceptable options, including helping Iraq under Saddam Hussein extract more oil by easing embargoes that were meant to hem Hussein in.

"The US could consider reducing restrictions on oil investment inside Iraq," the report said. But if Hussein's "access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to U.S. allies in the region if weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, weapons regimes and the coalition against him are not strengthened."

Iraq is a "key swing producer turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest," the report said, adding that there was even a "possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time" in order to drive up prices.

"Under this scenario, the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages," the report said. "These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention."

The report recommended Cheney move swiftly to integrate energy and national security policy as a means to stop "manipulations of markets by any state" and suggested that his task force include "representation from the Department of Defense."

"Unless the United States assumes a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game," the report said, "US firms, US consumers and the US government [will be left] in a weaker position."

Two years after the Baker report, the United States - along with Great Britain and other allies - invaded Iraq. Now, more than six years later, the US oil industry finally appears to be in a strong position relative to Iraq's oil riches.

However, the price that has been paid by American troops, Iraqi civilians and the US taxpayers has been enormous.

'5 WAYS THE MAN-IN-THE-STREET IS BAMBOOZLED 1. HE THINKS THAT MONEY IS CREATED BY THE GOVERNMENT, THROUGH THE MINT AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND, AND IT CONSISTS LARGELY OF NOTES AND COINS. FACT -- Only 3% of money is in the form of notes and coins created by the government.

The handing over of control of interest rates to central banks is confirmation that politicians have surrendered the economic field to financiers. Further confirmation is in the almost wholesale deregulation of financial markets.

Governments have the same attitude to the global markets. Around $2 trillion are traded daily on global currency markets purely for speculative reasons -- to make profits, not to finance legitimate trade -- and governments do nothing about it despite the damage caused to the value of their currencies and to their economies.'

'On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, "I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that." People laughed — and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a "permabear." When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini’s talk, he noted that Roubini’s predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.'

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Jul 02, 2009 8:38 AM

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper's own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli both said they were not aware of the flier.

"This should never have happened," Weymouth told Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. "The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

Brauchli told Kurtz he was "appalled" by the plan."It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli told Kurtz. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post."

Earlier this morning, Brauchili said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events - a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Katharine Weymouth. Brauchli,was named on the flier as one of the "Hosts and Discussion Leaders."

The offer - which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters - was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Many people from around the world have spent the last two days writing letters and calling elected officials, demanding that Israel release the 'Spirit of Humanity' humanitarian aid boat, its cargo, and crew. But we must do more. Over the next several days, US Congress will be on holiday recess, a new humanitarian aid convoy led by Viva Palestina will attempt to enter Gaza, and the fate of the 21 civilians being held in Israel remains uncertain. Let's keep the media focused on this matter.

Members of the Free Gaza Movement, a group of civilians from 10 countries who launched this initiative, include Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The 'Spirit of Humanity' was taken, illegally, from international waters.

The aid was being delivered in the wake of a 22-day military assault against the Gaza Strip last winter, in which Amnesty International has charged the Israeli military with "reckless conduct, disregard for civilian lives and property, and a consistent failure to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects."

The Gaza Strip has also been subjected to a crippling blockade for two years, in which the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza have been at the whim of the Israeli military. The people of Gaza face severe shortages of medicine, food, and materials that are necessary for rebuilding homes after the war.

The human rights activists who are being held in Israel need our support. We can build the pressure necessary to secure their release and prevent such seizures in the future. We can support the Free Gaza Movement by making sure the press covers this incident and people are aware of it.

Click here to write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Follow the simple directions and help make a difference!

In 1845, an American columnist, John O'Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent." Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon."

And that claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The westward expansion did not originate with O'Sullivan's theory. In 1803, the United States acquired 23 percent of its existing territory through the Louisiana Purchase. Seeing land as a source of political power, the government began to actively pursue aggressive expansion of its territories through the 19th century. The idea of Manifest Destiny was one component of the process which captured the popular imagination. This was further fueled by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the West attracting Easterners acting on their conviction in their right and duty to expand.

The Mexican-American conflict generated massive casualties, and when it was over, the US controlled all of New Mexico and California, and more of the territory of Texas. When Texas was annexed in 1846 as the 26th state, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote, "We have not one particle of right to be here."

Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn told Truthout, "The Mexican War, presented as something we were doing because Mexicans had fired on our soldiers ... no, we were going to Mexico because we wanted to take forty percent of Mexican land. California, Arizona, Nevada ... all of that beautiful land in the Southwest that was all Mexico. I'll bet there are very few Americans today who live in that area and know that it belonged to Mexico. Or they may ask, how come all these names? How come Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Santa Ana, how come?"

Perhaps Americans seriously believe that the US was preordained by God to expand and exercise hegemony over all that it surveys? After all, our 25th president, William McKinley, (1897-1901) declared that "The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation."

In the Sandwich Island Letters from Hawaii, Mark Twain exhorted his country folk sardonically, "We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose - some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"

ReplyAs the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip struggle to rebuild their society with mud in the face of a crippling official blockade by the Israeli government, hundreds of Israeli protesters arrived at the border today to block what little humanitarian aid the government deigns to allow in, forcing the military to close the crossings entirely for much of the day.

Protesters block humanitarian aid from reaching GazaThe protesters are demanding the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held by the Hamas government for three years. Despite progress in the negotiation for his release, the demonstrators have demanded that no aid be allowed into the tiny strip as an effort to win international sympathy for his plight.

"There is no other way but collective punishment," one of the demonstrators declared, but in the face of 1.5 million civilians living in the bombed out remains of their society in the wake of January's Israeli invasion being deprived of humanitarian aid, it seems unfathomable that the international focus will be on a soldier being held to trade for some of the thousands of Gazans held in Israeli detention.

Of the 73 trucks expected to cart humanitarian aid into the strip, only seven were allowed in. In the face of growing opposition to letting food and fuel into the enclave, several Israeli companies have reportedly announced that they will no longer transport goods into Gaza until Shalit is released.

AIDA REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank – Pink Floyd's former frontman Roger Waters said Tuesday he'll take to the stage the minute Israel tears down its West Bank separation wall, just as he did in Berlin two decades ago when another wall came down.

Visiting a Palestinian refugee camp in the shadows of the towering concrete structure, the British rocker who co-wrote the iconic 1970s album "The Wall" said he hopes "this awful thing is destroyed soon."

Waters, 65, said the West Bank wall has been on his mind since he first saw it up close in what he described as an eye-opening visit in 2006, following a concert in Israel.

"People who haven't actually seen this, what's going on here, can't actually imagine the impression that it has on you, the sick, kind of churning feeling that you get in your very heart when you see this, how depressing it is," Waters said.

Water's comments didn't sit very well with Israeli government.

Israel began building the barrier — a concrete wall in urban areas and fence with sensors and barbed wire along rural stretches — in 2002, citing security reasons.

Palestinians says it's a land grab because, once the final third is built, it will slice off 10 percent of the West Bank, part of the lands they want for their state.

The stretch of barrier between occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Bethlehem consists of graffiti-covered gray slabs, with army watchtowers rising up at intervals.

Waters dismissed Israel's security argument, saying he believes the wall "is not here to stop Israelis being blown up on buses." He said if that was the sole reason, "what's it doing in the occupied territories, surrounding settlements and cutting (Palestinian) farmers off from their olive trees and so on and so forth?"

"This is an exercise of colonialism," said Waters.

Waters said he believes the barrier is indefensible.

"When you stand in front of an edifice like this, whether it's here or outside a township in South Africa, or in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War, or in Berlin in the 60s and 70s, it's something you know instinctively that this is wrong. It's a bad thing," he said. "It cannot survive forever."

If it does come down one day, he said, he'll perform at the site, just like he did in 1990, at a spot where the Berlin Wall had fallen just a year earlier. "In fact, I would insist on it," he said.

In the meantime, he's considering performing elsewhere in the West Bank, perhaps in the town of Ramallah, but has not made firm plans. On Monday, Waters visited a refugee camp in the northern town of Jenin to support efforts to reopen a local movie house that closed in 1987.

Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1985, ruled out a reunion with his former band mates; their last joint performance was in 2005, for a Live 8 concert.

"We had a great career as Pink Floyd. We all enjoyed it. We all workedtogether and enjoyed everything and it was brilliant. I think it'sover," he said.